In short i just jumped into the whole Mastodon blocking drama and am somewhat disappointed to see it as childish as reddit’s power mod drama. Accelerated by the fact that a Limit/Mute option exist just fine, i wonder why Block/Defederation is an option at all. It only moves power from the user to admins without anything in return. With just Mute, as far as i can tell, one still wouldn’t have to look on certain instances, but could interact/whitelist certain individuals and we’d get rid of the multi account requirement overnight. So why isn’t it that way?
Edit: For those annoyed by the same siloing issues, look into ATProto. Bluesky may be a big unknown, but the protocol itself looks a lot more promising in terms of user freedom.
I think it is interesting to think about decentralized social network structures and I am interested to see what types of communities can arise out of them but I think it is a huge mistake to conclude that because massive monolithic centralization is a problem that the polar opposite is necessarily best.
There are advantages to degrees of coordination and grouping, 99% of the time when my instance admin defederates from another instance it saves me from having to do something I was already going to. There is obviously a risk but so long as there is a healthy community of alternative instances this isn’t actually an issue.
I think that is the point too, the system you are asking for seems like it puts more power in the users hands and that is certainly true to a certain extent, but this vision quickly falls away when you put new users in a situation where in the federated feed they keep encountering toxic instances they have to repeatedly step outside of their pleasant experience to block.
To put it another way, you are making EVERYBODY in a community experience something toxic, emotionally react to that and then have to block that instance/user. It’s like tasting milk to see if it has gone bad, realizing it has gone very bad with chunks floating around in it but instead of throwing it away so nobody else in the household has to have such a unpleasant experience you just put the milk back and decide you aren’t going to drink it but you aren’t going to bother to tell anyone else in the house either.
It might seem like you are guaranteeing everyone the freedom to choose the milk they want but you are also giving rancid milk the power to get into as many mouths as possible. Is that really the better solution?
At any rate, you can still follow accounts on instances your instance has defederated from.